The IP will change pretty soon BTW. I'll make an announcement on the main page when I get my allocations.

Thanks for the info. By the way, I am working on designing a new game based loosely on concepts gathered from OOII, TradeWars 2002, and some other games. It will feature map exploration (as in OOII) as well as space travel to other sectors (as in TradeWars). I have a VERY NICE descriptive info file if u wanna look at it, as well as a couple of screenshot mock-ups.....I need a coder however. I can do graphics and sound myself but I am no programmer (yet).... :roll:

Hey Mindphaser, are you a programmer? If so, are you familiar with Visual C++ 6? I need someone to help code the game I'm working on, but I'll probably end up doing it myself (I used to do assembly, so C++ shouldn't be too hard to learn)

If you want to see my work on it thus far, email me:

dragonstar_reborn @ yahoo.com (without the spaces of course)

The game is called "High Orbit" and is not very graphical at all.mostly it's text like in overkill, but with some minor graphics, mostly non-animated. You start on Earth, exploring the map, etc, but over time you can get land, water, and air vehicles and spacecraft, as well as taming wild NPC creatures as mounts. Once you have a good ship, you can travel to other space sectors, find other worlds, and build empires that span the stars. There are many rare and unique items, and new things (items, plants, animals, monsters, etc) can be created by players with access to the proper buildings...

It will be a MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), and will allow thousands of players to play at once.

Combat is similar to the combat system used in Final Fantasy series, to save me a crapload of animation headaches.

I have 2 jobs, so I have very little time to work on it (or to learn VC++ 6 for that matter) but I will hopefully be able to get the project going sometime soon....I have tinkered with it enough to where I feel the game will be well balanced and easy for newbies to figure out.....

It will be Freeware, but when I have 10,000 players I will implement a way for players to purchase (with their credit card)Ultra-rare and Unique items, vehicles, weapons, spacecraft, etc.Common and Uncommon items (and just about anything in the game) can be purchased in this way, but cheaper than rare stuff.The game software would still be freeware, with no fees for playing like with fancier games, but I'd get money from people buying stuff ingame (or better yet, thru PayPal). Then I could afford to assemble a team of super-nerds to help improve on the concept and turn it into a REAL game, with better graphics and some music, cinematics, etc.

WHEW!!! A lot of work cut out for me, but I'm up to the challenge. Now I just need a couple of years to get started.... :?

The game is called "High Orbit"... it will be a MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), and will allow thousands of players to play at once. It will be Freeware, but when I have 10,000 players I will implement a way for players to purchase (with their credit card) Ultra-rare and Unique items, vehicles, weapons, spacecraft, etc. Common and Uncommon items (and just about anything in the game) can be purchased in this way, but cheaper than rare stuff. The game software would still be freeware, with no fees for playing like with fancier games, but I'd get money from people buying stuff ingame (or better yet, thru PayPal). Then I could afford to assemble a team of super-nerds to help improve on the concept and turn it into a REAL game, with better graphics and some music, cinematics, etc.

Good luck on your project, Blaze. Sounds very aspiring! I hope you stay on target with it, as multiplayer gaming is always expanding. We need more!

[HL-1 is my favorite game of all time, definitely. I haven't played HL-2 yet, citing a shite video card, but veryvery soon. (Santa, are you listening?)

Anyone played Far Cry? Gorgeous terrain. That'd be a nifty game engine to use for an Overkill 3-D type game.

Does any modeler/animator out there want to build about 50+ monsters for it? [/quote]

Half-Life 2 was well worth the $60 (tax and all) I paid for it.There's a "Zero-point Gravity Gun" which you can use to draw objects (from cinder blocks to old shoes to office desks) towards you, then launch them away. Great for clearing traffic jams.

Towards the end of the game, your grav-gun gets super-charged, and you can literally yank the enemy to you and shoot them back at the others. They fall REALISTICLY, ie if you throw something at their legs they flip over as in real life. The physics in HL2 are AWESOME. The grave gun (when supercharged it becomes energy gun) is SOOOOOO coool!!!!! I was grabbing dead bodies and using them as shields, then sending the other enemies flying by whacking them with the corpse of their comrade. GET IT DUSTIN!!! SHOOT YOUR OLD VID CARD, GET A NEW ONE, AND BUY HALF-LIFE 2!!!!!! You will NOT regret it!!! Plus, they just (2 days ago) released the multi-player DM version. I've never before in my life seen a game where players can beat each other up with urinals and street signs. (drool....)

Ok, gotta go play it now.....hehehe. By the way, if OO ever goes 3D use the HL2 engine. Go to www.havok.com for details on the physics system they use. Also, the SDK for HL2 is out, and just like HL1 it's a very easy to learn engine. Imagine throwing your rations at a germite as you rush back to the complex with 1 hp....lol....ok maybe a shockel, but not a germite.......(thems good eatin'!!!)

The game is called "High Orbit"... it will be a MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), and will allow thousands of players to play at once. It will be Freeware, but when I have 10,000 players I will implement a way for players to purchase (with their credit card) Ultra-rare and Unique items, vehicles, weapons, spacecraft, etc. Common and Uncommon items (and just about anything in the game) can be purchased in this way, but cheaper than rare stuff. The game software would still be freeware, with no fees for playing like with fancier games, but I'd get money from people buying stuff ingame (or better yet, thru PayPal). Then I could afford to assemble a team of super-nerds to help improve on the concept and turn it into a REAL game, with better graphics and some music, cinematics, etc.

Good luck on your project, Blaze. Sounds very aspiring! I hope you stay on target with it, as multiplayer gaming is always expanding. We need more!

I gave up for a while on my game idea, but then one day after downing 2 cans of "Venom (Death Adder)" energy drinks, I somehow learned Visual Basic 2008 Express programming in about 2 or 3 hours. I made a quickie mp3 player, a graphical login screen for my game, and then realized I may actually be able to make the whole thing myself (cheap and crappy though it most certainly may be).

I realized I would need to make an editor for it first, so I began about 3 weeks ago working on an editor for the game.I changed the game name to Oasis Project, and so far I have a map editor that you can explore OOII-style along with a (still glitchy) space editor + starbase maker (those need work though, just left off on it earlier tonight).

I added editable mapflags (fire, landmines, etc etc) and up to 3 editable weather patterns per each of 20 planets.The planets themselves range from 50x50 to 200x200 in size, with an equal-sized "underground" map, and each planet will have 1 AFB sub-map and 1 Alien Prison sub-map. There's also a dialog for creating complexes for each planet. A planet is considered "owned" when someone claims a complex (except Terra Complex, which is where everyone starts out).

The coolest part is when I realized I can use animated .gifs in VB, so I went bananas and downloaded a bunch of "royalty free" gifs of mecha, ufos, etc etc.... although all the BMP images (terrain graphics & planet / building images) I did myself in Bryce 4 and Photoshop 5.

I decided to limit the graphics. Although you can choose a mech image or ship image to use for your mech/ship/vehicle/etc, it's mostly just eye candy. You will see it on the combat screen, and I considered a hybrid OOII / Final Fantasy 2 type of system, where the party and the enemy party (btw did I mention you can have 5 players/NPCs in a party?) are lined up on the screen and take turns like in FF2, but with a graphical version of the OOII action combat, which I always loved...Action Combat *MADE* the BBS experience for me.

I'm such a nerd....lol

Anyway, I'll put all my current game notes and a copy of my UNFINISHED editor up on FileFront, and I'll be back here to post a link to it should any of you be interested in taking a look. HOWEVER, before I do that, I need to add a few more things....ability to place bases, create Vehicles (cars, trucks, boats, airplanes, helicopters), create mecha and spaceships, NPCs, and generally just make all the buttons "do something".

As it is now, I could spend hours crafting a map for just 1 world, laying out Caves to go between above-ground and underground, figuring out the best places to put a Bone Pile or a certain cell in the alien prison...man oh man, Overkill warped my fragile little mind as a teenager, now my chair is giving me 'roids, carpal tunnel, and arthritis from all the sitting and typing and drawing and crap....I truly hope I can at least make a single-player WORKING version. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the Client/Server networking stuff. Seems to be easier in VB than in C++ (which I did *NOT* learn in 21 days--or ever, despite the name of the book), but reading other peoples' code confuses the hell out of me.

OH!!! I should also mention, I figured out a way (assuming I can get the MMOG thing down) to do multi-player action combat...They'd take turns, like in FF2, but with an action combat option.